Posted on 01/12/2023 1:59:40 AM PST by marktwain
Dana with Polar Bear skin at a Panarctic station. Skin went to the Government.
Some details have been revealed about the polar bear attack by a sow and cub at Panarctic oil exploration station on King Christian Island in 1983. The attack was uncovered with a Freedom of Information Act request by AmmoLand, requested by this correspondent. It was previously reported on AmmoLand on September 7, 2022. In that article the ficticious names of Joe and Dave were used. Their true names were Dana and Gary. The person who witnessed the bear attack his colleague and who shot the bear, was Dana, who has since retired and lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He was only 18 at the time. He was able to apply and get a job as a roustabout because his father was a foreman at the Panarctic base camp. The victim was 30 years old. His name was Gary Edmond.
On December 18, 1983, the camp on King Christmas Island had only been open for a couple of days. There were no dogs at the camp to warn of polar bears. Ordinarily, dogs would have been present, and would have provided some warning.
Gary, who was mauled and nearly eaten by the polar bear, was new to the camp as well. He did not know where the incinerator was. He took a right turn instead of a left. That took him to the back of he camp were the sump was instead of to the incinerator. The bears were near the sump.
Dana grew up on a farm in northern Alberta. He had hunted deer before signing on to Panarctic, with his father's .303 British bolt action rifle. He knew how to operate a bolt action rifle, such as the one on King Christian Island. That rifle did not have optics, only open sights.
Dana with Buck killed North of Edmonton
It is a bad idea to keep a rifle with optics in a warm environment, then take it outside into extreme cold. The sudden exposure to cold can cause the inside of the scope to fog, or the thermal shock can cause lenses to crack or seals to be breached.
At the Panarctic camp on King Christian Island, Dana lost sight of Gary. Then he heard him yelling and saw him come back around the corner, with the bear after him. Dana rushed to the camp building. He knew where the only rifle on King Christian Island was kept. When he paused at the camp door, he looked back, and saw the bear swat Gary's legs. Gary went down.
Dana charged in, woke up the radio radio operator and informed him what was going on. Dana came out with the rifle, a .308 or 30-06 bolt action. He fired a couple of shots in the air. They were not very loud as the report dissipated upward into the cold, arctic, air.
Alerted by the radio operator, everyone at the camp came to help search for Gary and the polar bear. Dana pointed out where he thought the bear had gone, when it dragged Gary back around the corner. The driver of the front end loader went looking, and found the bear and Gary first. The operator fought for Gary, using the front end loader and its forks, in a scene which might have been made for an movie about aliens.
Dana waited for the foreman to show up in the pickup truck. When it showed up, he jumped in, carrying the rifle. Dana was the only armed person in the camp. The operator of the front end loader had confronted the bear. They heard the front end loader honking.
As the foreman and Dana approached the front end loader, they saw the polar bears leaving. Dana shot the sow and destroyed its jaw, then it was gone. The yearling cub was about 30-40 yards away. The cub ran off as well.
After Gary was medevaced back to Edmonton and the wounded bear had been killed by Eskimos brought in for the purpose, Panarctic offered to short circuit Dana's shift to go home almost two weeks early. Dana decided to stay.
Dana regretted the decision to stay at King Christian Island. He had to be out and about to do his work. it was always dark in December and January far north of the arctic circle. He continually imagined a polar bear, just out of sight, in the perpetual dark, such as when he was putting out smudge cans of toilet paper and diesel fuel for runway lights.
Only one gun was on the site. He was not allowed to take the company gun with him. No one was allowed to have or carry sidearms at Panarctic sites.
Dana stayed working for Panarctic for another 6 or 7 years, then quit to be closer to home. He had gotten married. He eventually became a welder, but had a cardiac arrest two years ago and is now retired.
He is still a hunter. He harvested two deer and a moose last season. He uses a .338 Winchester Magnum in a Browning bolt action Medallion rifle with a Boss muzzle brake attachment and a Burris Eliminator scope.
Gary, the man who was mauled, underwent a lot of surgeries. His scalp was hanging off in strips, Dana saw tendons and bones in his arm.
Dana said he never wanted to go through a bear attack again.
Dana is unhappy with the current Trudeau administration's push to ban and confiscate guns. He said nearly everyone he knows voted against Prime Minister Trudeau.
Many in Canada's western provinces treasure their ability to keep and use firearms.
Dana has wondered why there was so little coverage about the polar bear attack at the Panarctic station in 1983.
Opinion: The government did not want the serious danger of polar bears made more obvious in the eyes of the public. There was little coverage of the polar bear attack. There was a short article published in the Edmonton Journal, on page 1, on December 20, 1983. Details of the attack would never have been known, aside from local coverage, if not for the Freedom of Information Act request conceived by this correspondent and executed by AmmoLand.
©2023 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
Gun Watch
Just a Canadian farm boy. Wow.
I don’t know what’s more chilling: the details of the attack, or the fact government would deprive such people the only effective means of defence they have.
Update? 1983?
Huh.
He’s in rural Alberta. Looking for Trudeau supporters there would be like looking for Lincoln voters in south-eastern Virginia in 1860.
The commies keep telling us, you will own nothing and be happy. Last year americans bought 16 million firearms, that is 2021. Sixteen million. Sounds to me like we will own firearms. I wouldn’t want to be the person assigned to confiscate them.
Just as firearms are very useful for sorting out animal attacks.
They are very useful for other things also.
Very little was published about the incident in 1983.
The first account was published at AmmoLand on September 7, 2022, based on a response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
That prompted Dana to contact the publisher. This is an updated account with details provided by Dana, which were not in the information from the Freedom of Information Act response.
....I “THINK” some people overstate “official” enforcement of gun laws in Canada or at least in the far west territories like Yukon. I’ve been through Customs at the border between the US and Canada with my guns and I’ve been up and down the Yukon during several summers with my guns. I even had two armed RCMP guys IN MY BOAT where guns were laying all over the place. They even fixed my GPS for me while on board!
In my opinion, Canada has a bunch of gun laws that come down all over the place like liberals can’t help but do. But, “enforcement” of the myriad, hopelessly complex and conflicted gun laws around Canada, a HUGE country, is another question.
Opinion: The government did not want the serious danger of polar bears made more obvious in the eyes of the public. There was little coverage of the polar bear attack. There was a short article published in the Edmonton Journal, on page 1, on December 20, 1983. Details of the attack would never have been known, aside from local coverage, if not for the Freedom of Information Act request conceived by this correspondent and executed by AmmoLand.We didn't need the virus to prove that Canada has a seriously disturbed government, only to expose it. Yet it continues to thrive, based primarily upon its economic partnership with the US.
2-legged animal attacks, as well.
“I don’t know what’s more chilling: the details of the attack, or the fact government would deprive such people the only effective means of defence they have.”
Such as today with hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc....
But wide variety of contradictory laws in various overlapping jurisdictions only means the canadian and US government gets to “selectively enforce” anti-gun laws against EXACTLY THE PEOPLE THEY CHOSE to persecute (er, prosecute) WHENEVER the government decides they want to persecute their opponents.
But wide variety of contradictory laws in various overlapping jurisdictions only means the canadian and US government gets to “selectively enforce” anti-gun laws against EXACTLY THE PEOPLE THEY CHOSE to persecute (er, prosecute) WHENEVER the government decides they want to persecute their opponents.
I hate to spoil a good narrative, but I believe most of us here in the great white north worked out from first principles that it would be handy to have guns at the ready if wandering around in the vicinity of bears of any kind, let alone polar bears which are the nastiest kind.
Suppressing that information is more laughable than shocking.
I can imagine Trudeaux of all ages (we’ve had a couple) earnestly advising awe-struck helpers not to inform the people that bears were dangerous. It is just the sort of thing that an idiot would think might advance their interests, not to mention such an obscure fact.
Do polar bears stalk humans? Are bear attacks a given when humans live and recreate in bear country? Is there anything we can do to prevent these tragedies? I am often asked these questions because I study bear-human conflicts as part of my research program. Let's consider the first question: Are polar bears natural-born stalkers of humans? If this were true we would see far more polar bear attacks than we do.
Take this, for instance: in spite of the fact that humans and polar bears have co-existed in Churchill (the "Polar Bear Capital of the World") for 300 years, only two fatalities have ever been recorded. Just two! Yes, there have been a few non-fatal attacks, but when analyzed closely we see that most often the bears involved were surprised, felt threatened, or were acting to defending themselves. In Alaska, there have been only two polar bear-inflicted fatalities in 130 years, but both were avoidable in my opinion. Of course, polar bears are potentially dangerous and must be treated with respect. But is it their innate inclination to see humans as prey? Apparently not. In short, polar bears been given a bad rap for misdeeds they have not committed.
Notice Smith uses a number of ways which can be characterised as misleading with the numbers.
He subtly changes the dynamic by talking about attacks, then equating attacks to fatalities.
He limits polar bear attacks to only those which can be authenticated through written records... which were extremely sparse in polar bear habitat.
He specifically uses the numbers from Alaska, where there are very few polar bears or people in polar bear habitat, and ignores much larger numbers in polar bear habitat in Canada, Norway, or Russia. All of which he has access too as a researcher in the Polar bear Human Interface Information Management System he helped to populate.
Then he excuses polar bears for attacking people, as if he can accurately read the polar bear minds, and apply human legal defenses.
According to Smith, if only people where there are polar bears, radically change their behavior, then the polar bears will not attack them...
The publication is merely Smith's personal opinion. He does not have to defend his opinion in peer review. But as an academic, it carries more weight.
I agree.
Only an urban academic who rarely or never sees bears would formulate such a theory about them being largely benign. I don’t picture them as being non-stop hunters of human beings, there’s some truth to the concept that bears will attack mostly when they feel threatened. Of course mother bears with cubs are more likely to attack humans. I live in a town where black bears and the occasional grizzly will be seen roaming around looking for food sources. They rarely attack people but they can be aggressive, opening vehicles and even sometimes house doors looking for food.
Polar bears (nowhere near here) are probably most aggressive, then grizzlies and at the lower end black or brown bears. The latter have odd habits like sitting up in trees unbeknownst to the human population. A friend once discovered that a bear was in her tall cedar tree one night, she only learned this by hearing it grunting to warn of its presence. Otherwise you would never guess a bear was up there but dogs of course know more than we do and start barking at a furious rate at bears we don’t know are nearby.
I don’t know if griz ever climb trees, they are probably too heavy after a certain age.
He seems to idolize bears.
From my reading and research, grizzly bears are the most dangerous and likely to attack with little or no warning.
Polar bears are sort of between. They are not as territorial as grizzly bears. Most of their attacks are predatory, like black bears.
But, because they have little contact with humans, they are more likely to "test" the prey to get an idea if it is dangerous, or not.
This gives armed humans a good chance to stop the threat before contact is made.
Also, polar bears have less cover to hide them than, generally, grizzly bears or black bears.
Govt trying to confiscate weapons from citizens.
Not surprising, polticians are afraid citizens will do to them what was done to the polar bears
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